48 research outputs found
Introducing Hierarchy in Energy Games
In this work we introduce hierarchy in wireless networks that can be modeled
by a decentralized multiple access channel and for which energy-efficiency is
the main performance index. In these networks users are free to choose their
power control strategy to selfishly maximize their energy-efficiency.
Specifically, we introduce hierarchy in two different ways: 1. Assuming
single-user decoding at the receiver, we investigate a Stackelberg formulation
of the game where one user is the leader whereas the other users are assumed to
be able to react to the leader's decisions; 2. Assuming neither leader nor
followers among the users, we introduce hierarchy by assuming successive
interference cancellation at the receiver. It is shown that introducing a
certain degree of hierarchy in non-cooperative power control games not only
improves the individual energy efficiency of all the users but can also be a
way of insuring the existence of a non-saturated equilibrium and reaching a
desired trade-off between the global network performance at the equilibrium and
the requested amount of signaling. In this respect, the way of measuring the
global performance of an energy-efficient network is shown to be a critical
issue.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communication
Constrained Cost-Coupled Stochastic Games with Independent State Processes
We consider a non-cooperative constrained stochastic games with N players
with the following special structure. With each player there is an associated
controlled Markov chain. The transition probabilities of the i-th Markov chain
depend only on the state and actions of controller i. The information structure
that we consider is such that each player knows the state of its own MDP and
its own actions. It does not know the states of, and the actions taken by other
players. Finally, each player wishes to minimize a time-average cost function,
and has constraints over other time-avrage cost functions. Both the cost that
is minimized as well as those defining the constraints depend on the state and
actions of all players. We study in this paper the existence of a Nash
equilirium. Examples in power control in wireless communications are given.Comment: 7 pages, submitted in september 2006 to Operations Research Letter
A coherent picture of water at extreme negative pressure.
International audienceLiquid water at atmospheric pressure can be supercooled to 41 C (ref. 1) and superheated to C302 C (ref. 2). Experiments involving fluid inclusions of water in quartz suggest that water is capable of sustaining pressures as low as 140 MPa before it breaks by cavitation3. Other techniques, for which cavitation occurs consistently at around 30MPa (ref. 4), produce results that cast doubt on this claim. Here we reproduce the fluid-inclusion experiment, performing repeated measurements on a single sample--a method used in meteorology5, bioprotection6 and protein crystallization7, but not yet in liquid water under large mechanical tension. The resulting cavitation statistics are characteristic of a thermally activated process, and both the free energy and the volume of the critical bubble are well described by classical nucleation theory when the surface tension is reduced by less than 10%, consistent with homogeneous cavitation. The line of density maxima of water at negative pressure is found to reach 922:8 kgm3 at around 300 K, which further constrains its contested phase diagram